Case Study: Mistborn Adventure Game

Client: Crafty Games

Project Scope: Book layout.

Project Description: A 580-page hardback book for roleplaying in the setting of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn novels.

The Mistborn Adventure Game was based on an existing template provided by the client. The physical book is over 580 pages (my work was on the first 380 of those pages), printed as a hardcover novel with dust jacket to set alongside Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn novel series on a bookshelf. The interior is one color printing. The bulk of the project involved four aspects: a short story plus introduction to the game, the rules section, a section about the various metals, and an anthology of stories set in the world of Mistborn.

The Introduction had 14,800 words, which is a fifteen page short story from Brandon Sanderson (The Eleventh Metal), an overview of the world, a synopsis of the book series, and an overview of the game itself. The style of layout for this section is similar to work on a novel: mainly chapter headings and body copy treatment. The last part of the section has elements commonly found in rules texts: multiple header levels, various treatments for called out texts (bolding, bulleted lists, and the like).

This short section is followed by a 50,000 word book covering how to play the game. This 222-page section is similar to work on other gaming rules texts. In this section, several tables, sidebars, and asides were used to convey information. When cutting away to an example of a character sheet, the page itself appears to be torn away to reveal the relevant text, hidden by the page below.

Book Two is a 36,000 word section broken into twenty-four chapters, each dealing with a different metal type. Each of these chapters follow the same layout: introduction, how they’re treated in two different systems, a table for the rules section, and a sidebar note from the novel’s author.

The final section of the book project was a 63,000 word anthology of short stories, developed as an ePub product. Mistborn’s House of Ashes was one of my earliest works as ePub. Other projects (at the time of this writing) that I’ve converted to ePub include the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide and the Dragon Brigade: Affair of the Orb novella for Margaret Weis Productions.